Historiographic metafiction and postmodern pastiche, both defined by critic Linda Hutcheon as subversive literary and cultural strategies, have put Freud to work both as a clown and a stern cultural critic. My paper will first take a lighthearted look at some of the humorous images we find of Freud in popular culture, where Sigmund has long had iconic status, both in terms of his own physical likeness and in terms of stereotyped versions of his main ideas. To complement this analysis I shall contrast the popular image of Freud with the use of him in recent fiction by E.L. Doctorow and John Irving.